That was me I am sure. I have nothing but good things to say about foster slugs inside of 75 yds and sabots (from rifle barrels) inside of 150. As I said before, it seems some find this range limitation unacceptable. I get it, there are better options but it would seem we are talking about how effective shotguns are and not how they compare to rifles when a word like reviled is used to describe them. Reviled implies there is a perception that they are incapable of killing properly.
Foster slug<75yds=dead deer. Usually a DRT. (my definition of DRT is usually Dropped Right There, not necessarily Dead Right There. For my purposes, as long as the animal does not move from where it was standing the round used was a 100% success. If they get up after that, well then, that's not a DRT) . Does not matter if it was a double lung, heart, high shoulder, whatever)
Sabot slug<150yds=dead deer. Often but not as often DRT. Heart shots will usually not drop them but double lungs seem to work pretty well.
If you did your due diligence and sighted in your shotgun with slugs (within the limitations of your sights and your own shooting limitations, right?)(and you tried different brands and types of slugs too, right? Remington, Winchester, Federal, or the one everyone forgets about and is probably the best of them all, Brenneke) then you should hit your target if it is a high percentage shot. (target standing still, etc.)
I'm not sure there is enough bandwidth on this board for me to give personal examples of how much success I have had with slugs and how little failure. There was a catch though. I didn't take long shots. If they were out of range, I wasn't shooting. At the same time I have been party to other folks failures many times. You cant expect to get good shots on moving targets, targets out of range, or in the case of my dad, if your eyes are too old to see the open rifle sights he was using on his slug gun. (a low power scope fixed that)
Some interesting things I have seen with shotguns shooting deer:
-12 ga Foster slug at 30yds broadside right into the ham of a mature doe. DRT. That is not a typo. D-R-T. It did not move or twitch. I cannot fully explain this but can only assume the deer had undertaken such shock from the impact that the spine (and possibly the brain) was disrupted. You know, .73 caliber, 437 gr projectile going around 1300 fps at that range. Either way the deer was dead when approached.
-20 ga Foster slug at 60 yds broadside into the goodies of a small buck and into the liver of the mature doe right behind it. Both DRT.
-20ga Barnes sabot slug at 40 yds frontal shot on a large doe into the chest and exited out the keister. DRT Those slugs and their inferior sectional density.
-Or, 12 ga Lightfield sabot broadside through the heart of a doe. Typical. Ran 40 yds and crumpled.
-Heres a good one. This is an example of a yahoo shotgun hunter. 12 ga pump with just a bead. Shoots a buck in the guts with a foster slug and it drops right there. Approaches the deer and sees its still alive. He raises his gun to finish it off and somehow the deer snaps his head back and he ends up shooting off an antler. (The slug carried on though still killed it.) This seems like it could only happen to someone who just bought his license the day before and never sighted his gun in properly.
So what I am getting at is for me, IME, slugs are devastating on animals. I am curious how they would fare against elk and moose. However, as has been touched on earlier, if a rifle is an option, it is probably a better option than a shotgun. If in some bizzaro world I absolutely knew a shot was going to be 20 yds away I would probably opt for the shotgun if the game was in NA. If not a shotgun, my next option would not be a bottleneck rifle round but probably a similarly slow and short range cartridge like a 45-70 or 444 Marlin.
As it is, I currently can use any centerfire and I opt for a 44 mag rifle. This is mostly because I also hunt in a straight wall state. This gun has About the same ballistics as a sabot slug. Why aren't pistol caliber rifles so REVILED? 357 rifles or (gasp) handguns must be really anemic. Why is nobody condemning them so hard and heartily?